I ran out of steam on work tonight and decided to catch the latest episode of Ken Burn’s The War. Instead of sitting on my duff doing nothing I decided to upload a few of the pictures I’ve scanned from my grandfather’s scrapbook. More on this later…

So what will I be doing this semester?

LIS590QM Qualitative Methods
Another class adding methods to my bag of tricks. This will be more about observation, ethnography, structured and semi-structured interviewing and other techniques.

Sometimes I feel a little frustrated about how difficult it is to be interdisciplinary and to be in the know about what researchers at UIUC are doing. I’ve been trying to be proactive about this and scheduled some informal coffee meetings with faculty who are working in the area (and I’m about to head off to the “Museums Writ Large” reading group). The next two classes will help me get outside of GSLIS, and maybe also get some perspective on what I’m learning here.

LIS590PPL Public Pedagogies & Learning
One of the big holes in my knowledge about museums is the educational theory that underpins much of what we do. I’ve mostly been on the collections/exhibition/technical side of the museum world and have left the educating to the educators. But the more I look at virtual worlds such as Second Life, the more I’m feeling the need to fill that hole with some knowledge. I met Brenda through the IPRH Museums Write Large reading group and was pleased to learn that she’d officially been added to the GSLIS roster of faculty. Her research has focused on how history is presented in museum settings, something close to my heart. The course will itself be historical, tracing the different learning theories used in public institutions such as libraries, archives and museums.

ANTH517 Anthropological Approaches to Memory
Last year while poking around the “community of practice” literature I read a brilliant article by Janet Keller about how blacksmiths learn to do what they do (in Chalkin and Lave. Understanding Practice). This was just around the time that I was reading Lenore Sarasan’s ASC Survey Report on museum computerization in which she says:

Through major problems exist within many documentation systems, they appear to function adequetly becasue they are supported by a strong framework of oral tradition….Indeed, without oral tradition, many collections information systems would fail to fulfill the two basic functions of museum documentation. i.e. to lead the user to the specimen in a reasonable period of time , and to interrelate all the information sources, so that a user may easily find all the information recorded about an object within the system.

There’s been plenty of ink spilled about whether museum professionals are really professionals, or what kind of professionals we are. Even more so in discussing the functional role played by museum information professionals. Most of us learn much of what it means to be a member of the community through “on the job training” (OTJT) and participation in professional associations. All of this has kept me interested in the CoP approach, because I think it helps describe MIPs.

Turns out Janet Keller is faculty right here at UIUC and will be teaching Anthropological Approaches to Memory this fall:

Examines individual memory, the construction of memories in collective practice, and the orchestration of memory in social institutions such as museums and ritual. Reflects critically on primary sources, to integrate theory and ethnography and to compare alternative approaches.

I’m hoping to explore how we, the museum professioanal community, collectively create memory and rituals about what we do, why we do it, and how we formally (museum studies + academic disciplines) and informally (OTJT) transmit that to emerging professionals.

And lastly Hooray! This will be my last full semester of coursework as a PhD student. After this it will be dusting off my notes from the last two years and getting ready for field exams.

Thank god for Boing Boing, which amazingly has provided exceptional coverage of all matters cultural heritage. Last week they reposted a message from Rick Prelinger’s blog about the decision by Society of American Archivists to NOT save the archive of its listservs dating back to 1993. An archivist responded to the post noting that it is common practice in the archival community to dispose of “routine correspondence.” (and I did dispose of lots of “routine correspondence” while processing collections in my archival days…)

Having recently spent a lot of time conducting research on the history of museum computing, I would love to have access to this sort of routine correspondence from my community of interest. Hell, I’m still pissed that MCN operated a listserv for years that didn’t even have an archive of messages (which we corrected upon moving to Mailman). John, if you’re listening, I’ll also be happy to personally take the archives of Museum-L off your hands if you decide it needs to be deleted!

However I argue that the listserv of any professional community is more than “routine” correspondence. Within those messages are the history of how a community has developed and changed. What are the major arguments the community went through? What were the issue of the day? Who was talking about them – who was responding? While within a larger corporate archives, or even within my own personal archive of e-mails I can see the value of pruning to eliminate duplication, or developing a strategy to eliminate irrelevant messages. This kind of appraisal usually requires a fair amount of labor. Is the cost of that labor even close to equal to the cost of storage (the SAA Council suggests it lacks sufficient “evidential or informational value”)? Probably not. Are there appropriate places and times to expunge routine correspondence – you bet. Is the Archivists listserv that place. No.

Rick mentions that the Internet Archive has some information from the publicly available archives – but just think of all the other parts of the “hidden web” that have been missed.

What is even more frustrating is that the message Rick posted was dated March 13, only a matter of weeks before the archive will cease to exist. SAA, I’m disappointed.

Off to a meeting, so I’ll have to leave these thoughts unfinished.